GG Books
Books to read directly via the Internet
Books are actually quite easy to publish via the Internet. All you need is an email account that lets you have your own web page with enough storage for the book. Because text doesn't take up a lot of room, the storage typically provided by many(not all) Internet Service Providers(ISPs) is enough to store many typical length books as a series of web-pages. As an example AT&T Worldnet allows its clients to have 6 email accounts. Each account can have its own website and each website is allowed up to 10 Megabytes of storage room. Roughly speaking this means you could publish books containing a total of about 4 million words. AT&T charges (roughly) $20 per month for this which includes connection to the Internet so, for people who have to have a connection to the Internet anyway, the maintenance of the book(s) in published form is basically free.

It's a lot of work to convert a book into a series of web pages and to ensure that these are readily available to the on-line reader. You need a synopsis so people can decide whether they want to try reading your work. You need an index. You need to decide whether the book will be indexed by pages or by small sections. The pages need to flow smoothly both backwards and forwards. You need to decide what font to use, what background color etc.

This is where GG Books can help. We charge a fee based on the number of words in the book. Contact us at:bbook_bg@att.net for more information. If you don't have a decent ISP we can help you get one but basically we expect that you will already be using one (note: if you are using Hotmail or another of those freebies, you may need to get yourself another service).

Assuming you have a decent ISP, you send us the book in a format that's readable by Microsoft Word so we can review it. We will also need a synopsis of the book that can fit on a typical computer screen and, if you wish, a page describing the author. The text can be supplied in single or multiple files but it needs to be already correctly paginated, divided into Chapters, sections etc. We are happy to italicize, capitalize or bold text, center text on the page etc., but we will not do any editing of the text you send us (including spell-checking). If you ask us to do things which we don't think we can do for the price we will tell you this before you send us any money. (another note: we will not help you with works that are - in our opinion - gratuitously pornographic so please don't send them).

Once we have reviewed the book and feel that we can handle it we will email you a quotation and await your payment before proceeding. Then you will need to allow us to access your email account directly so we can begin to create the web-pages.

Things that will cost extra:

  • Pictures, diagrams, drawings - in fact any type of graphics (non-text) materials. Its because wherever you have a picture you have a much more complicated web-page that takes design work to set up. For this reason we can't really give you even a ball park idea of costs without seeing what you have in mind.
  • Domain names. A domain name is something like www.thisismygreatestbook.com If you are with a company like AT&T what you will get is something like "thisismygreatestbook.home.att.net" which does not automatically translate into an Internet link. This is not really a problem. Google will (eventually) find and index your website and anybody will still be able to access it over the Internet. Plus which we will put a link to it on our website. But some people will want to have one of these and so you will have to go through a site that will let you use your own domain name and pay the annual fee (assuming its available). We can help you do this.
  • Publicity. You can spend quite a lot of money on this. We can point you in the right direction but then you're on your own. Publicity for a work on a technical subject is probably more worthwhile than for straight fiction because search engines like Google search for specific things - ask yourself : if I had a book called "this is my greatest book" how would I do a search for it on Google and who else would be likely to do the same search.
  • Donations. Even though your book is published and accessible to all on the Internet there is nothing to stop you asking for a donation from people who have read it and want to support you. You can do this quite easily, provided you have a bank account, via Paypal. You can set this all up yourself. If you want us to help you do it we will charge you a small amount extra. (See the Donate page of The Shopkeeper's Son). Any donations you get go directly to you: we don't know about them and have no access to them.
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Contact us at:bbook_bg@att.net Please list the subject matter as Re:Internet Book Publishing. All other emails will be assumed spam and deleted unread.

Produced for the Internet by GG Books.